The seat, the words, the line, and the tale of House Blackwood — drawn from the novels and the Citadel's fuller histories, with the television series set aside wherever it parts from the books.
House Blackwood ruled the upper Trident as river kings before the Andals came, and alone among the great riverlands houses has kept the old gods ever since, worshipping at the vast dead weirwood of Raventree Hall that gives their sigil its ravens. Their history is inseparable from an ancient feud with their neighbors at Stone Hedge, House Bracken — a grudge old enough that neither house agrees how it began, sharpened further when the Brackens took the Faith of the Seven the Blackwoods never would. It has produced kings, a king's favorite mistress, a Kingsguard-toppling sorcerer of a bastard son, and, in the present war, a lord who chose Robb Stark and found his rival besieging his gates for it.
The lords, ladies, and branches of Blackwood the books name — the notable, the infamous, and the merely unlucky.
mistress to King Aegon IV
fl. 172 AC
Became the sixth and best-loved of King Aegon IV's mistresses in 172 AC, bearing him two daughters and a son before her five years at court ended. Aegon marked the occasion by stripping a stretch of riverlands hills from his previous mistress, a Bracken, and renaming them for Melissa — a small cruelty to one house dressed as favor to another. Her son, Brynden Rivers, would be known to the realm by a darker name: Bloodraven.
Lord of Raventree Hall
fl. 298–300 AC
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
Where the sources disagree or a song outruns the maesters, the chronicle marks the doubt rather than settling it.
Whether the Blackwood-Bracken feud began five hundred or a thousand years before the Andals crossed the narrow sea is disputed even within the sources consulted; the Chronicle gives both figures rather than choose.
The claim that Bracken hands once poisoned the weirwood at Raventree Hall is presented in the sources as a Blackwood accusation, not a settled fact; the Chronicle records it as belief rather than event.
The identity of the archer who killed Amos Bracken at the Battle of the Burning Mill is given only as Blackwood family legend in the sources consulted; the Chronicle does not present it as confirmed.
House Blackwood ruled the upper Trident as river kings before the Andals came, and alone among the great riverlands houses has kept the old gods ever since, worshipping at the vast dead weirwood of Raventree Hall that gives their sigil its ravens. Their history is inseparable from an ancient feud with their neighbors at Stone Hedge, House Bracken — a grudge old enough that neither house agrees how it began, sharpened further when the Brackens took the Faith of the Seven the Blackwoods never would. It has produced kings, a king's favorite mistress, a Kingsguard-toppling sorcerer of a bastard son, and, in the present war, a lord who chose Robb Stark and found his rival besieging his gates for it.
House Blackwood holds Raventree Hall, in The Riverlands. The chronicle traces the house from its founding down to its part in the present tale, marking legend as legend wherever the songs run ahead of the record.
Book canon. This history follows George R. R. Martin's novels first, then the histories — Fire & Blood and The World of Ice & Fire — and does not follow the television series where it diverges.